Thirty-five years ago, when a New Jersey-based outfit called General Public Utilities was irresponsibly cutting corners to increase profits, an Allentown-based outfit known as PP&L was emerging as one of nation's best-run utility companies.

GPU, the parent corporation of Metropolitan Edison, the utility that operated the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, had a public-be-damned attitude that later resulted in criminal charges and a corporate criminal conviction related to the accident at TMI.

That 1979 accident did not just happen; it was caused by people who put profits first. It was only dumb luck and superb plant design that prevented the TMI meltdown from breaching containment, killing thousands and causing cancer for 50 miles downwind.

No corporate executive was ever held personally accountable. It was the public — taxpayers and electric utility ratepayers — that was forced to pick up the multi-billion-dollar tab for the TMI accident.

Pretty soon, PP&L (it later dropped the ampersand) fired up its own reactors at its Susquehanna plant near Berwick.

I was intimately familiar with TMI, having extensively covered that accident and its aftermath when I worked for The Associated Press. After coming to the Lehigh Valley, I took a close look at the way PPL handled its nukes. The differences between GPU and PPL were profound, and I've heaped praise on the latter for years.

Meanwhile, there were two other major nuclear power plant accidents. One was caused by a Russian operation even more irresponsible than GPU, and thousands died. The other was caused by an earthquake and tsunami of epic proportions in Japan, but it killed no one.

The worst consequence of TMI has been hysteria, which has prevented a single new reactor from being built in America since 1979, while France now gets nearly all its electricity from nuclear power, and even nuclear-phobic Japan does better than we.

Americans foul the air with coal fumes and pollute water with gas drilling, while wasting massive government subsidies on wind turbine scams, which do not produce nearly enough electricity to offset their cost.

Nuclear reactors are, by far, the safest and cleanest way to make electricity, if they're run the way PPL has run its Susquehanna plant. (PPL hopes to build a third reactor there, but construction is still years away.)

I needed to talk about all this to preface what's next — consideration of this past week's news that PPL wants to spin off the part of the company that, among other things, generates electricity.

A merger with something called Riverstone Holdings would create a new company, Talen Energy Corp., which a Riverstone executive was quoted as saying would result in "one of the largest independent power producers in the U.S." Hopefully, Talen would remain based in Allentown, where PPL's generating arm has hundreds of high-paying jobs.

I share those hopes, but I was more interested in the sort of outfit that would be in cahoots with PPL in the operation of its generating facilities, especially its nuclear generating facilities. Call me paranoid, but my TMI perspectives make me worry more about meltdowns than microeconomics.

According to various news accounts, Riverstone, based in New York City and Houston, was founded in 2000 by Pierre Lapeyre Jr. and David Leuschen.

On Friday, I got in touch with Riverstone spokesman Jim David and he confirmed that before 2000, Lapeyre and Leuschen had been executives at the giant Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs, one of America's most controversial companies.

You may recall news stories about Goldman's record profits of $11.6 billion in 2007, just as the nation was slipping into its cataclysmic banking crisis, which required taxpayers to fork over more than $100 billion in a massive federal bailout of several banks deemed too big to fail. That did not keep Goldman from dishing out $11.2 billion in bonuses to its executives in 2009.

In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Goldman with deceiving clients and the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation.

The Justice probe faded away in 2012 and the SEC case was settled for $550 million, chump change for Goldman. One of the Goldman executives who were held accountable was Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre, ordered to pay $825,000 after a federal judge found him liable for defrauding investors on the subprime mortgages that were a main cause of the banking crisis.

I know I'm a worrywart, but I'm nervous about putting nuclear reactors even partially under the control of an outfit founded by people from the profit-obsessed Goldman Sachs, so PPL spokesman George Lewis eased my concerns a little.

"The management of this new company that is going to be formed [Talen] are pretty much all PPL people," he told me Friday.

That is comforting, indeed, and the merger deal needs to be approved by both the feds and the state Public Utility Commission before it can go forward.

So I hope a condition of those approvals will be that nobody with a history of putting profits ahead of public interests can get within a mile of any decision-making process affecting the Susquehanna plant.